Behind the Screen - 2-14-18
Hello Adventurers!
Let’s have a peak behind the screen and chat about what’s going on with Adventures in Erylia.
It has been a long, long time since doing one of these. That was never the original intention, but every time I thought of doing one, nothing really seemed important enough to do this instead of edit, but I want to get these out more regularly now.
My goal is to keep these short, but if you just want the bullet points, here’s what I’m going to talk about:
- Episode 1 of the Erylian Epic
- Upgrade to Hindenburg Journalist Pro
- World Building Wednesday -> World Anvil
- Discord
- Patreon
- Moving hosts
Episode 1 of the Erylian Epic is recorded, and I am currently in the process of editing it. Based on where I am at right now in the editing process, I think you’ll be getting another long episode. I’m about an hour into the edit, and the current length is 2 and a half hours. By the time I get to the end, I have a feeling it’s going to be a bit short to cut into two episodes, so it will probably be released as a longer than usual episode.
I recently upgraded the software I use to edit. It’s actually the second upgrade since the relaunch. Back in December I started a trial period on Hindenburg Journalist. It is a non-destructive editor (meaning, when I make a cut, it “hides” the content instead of removes it). This was huge for me in regards to editing. Using Audacity like I had been meant that if I didn’t like a cut I made previously, I was stuck with it. I could undo things to a certain extent, but if I was on my second editing pass over an episode, it was far too late to go back and fix it. I bought Hindenburg when my trial ran out, and when they had their yearly sale on Feb 13th, I decided to upgrade it. This gave me access to a few more tools built in to the software that will hopefully make a difference down the line.
I don’t think it has really been talked about in any of the episode introductions, so I wanted to shout it out here. For a few months now I have been doing a weekly blog series that I call World Building Wednesday. In these blog posts, I go over some element about the world of Erylia and give it some depth in writing so that you guys can read about it and learn a little bit about the world and about my process when it comes to world building. About a month ago I was also turned on to a pretty amazing tool to help aid me in building the world of Erylia. World Anvil. World Anvil is a website where you can create an account and build the elements for your world in a wiki-like fashion. There is a ton of different categories for organizing your information and also a ton of text boxes for adding information that you may not even have been thinking about. I’m a part of the discord server for World Anvil, and it is an amazing community. Also, Dimitris, the guy behind World Anvil is an amazingly hard worker. You can see it in the updates channels. He is ALWAYS working on something. I’m not even sure the man sleeps. Oh, and if you don’t think you need a world building website for your D&D game, well he is currently working hard to create systems specific to RPGs.
Speaking of Discord. We have a Discord server, and you can join it! All of the members of the cast hang out in discord as a few friends we have made while gaming. We are also in voice chat usually at least once every weekend while we game together, so if you are interested in chatting with us and maybe getting in a game with us, come join our server. Unfortunately the discord invite links don’t play well with redirects, so the url is http://discord.gg/QfZvZ6J, which is also in the show notes for this episode.
We do have a Patreon set up for the show. If you’d like to contribute financially to the show, you can support the show on Patreon. We only have two tiers set up, $1/month and $5/month. $1 will get you the content part of our Patreon content, which includes our “lost” recordings from when the show was recorded on a Blue Yeti and sounded terrible as well as outtakes from our current episodes. I’ve been working to get the Patreon content caught up with the main episodes, usually releasing a few at once now. For $5 a month, you will get a personal thank you shout out during an episode, and your name will be added to a page on our website for those who support at that level.
And finally, for this time behind the screen, I am planning to change our podcast hosting. Currently, we host with PodBean. PodBean has worked well for us so far and I would still recommend them to anyone starting their own podcast. However, there are some features and opportunities that we would gain by switching to LibSyn as our podcast host. Some things that LibSyn can do for us is get us into more catalogs, like spotify and they will bring our business cards to any relevant event that they are attending. This change has not been made yet, and probably wont until April. Ideally, this change will have no effect on you as a listener. I have already reached out to LibSyn for the steps I need to take in order to change things over and get redirects in place in a way that you will hopefully not even notice the change. Some warning up front though, if you notice we miss a release day and haven’t said anything about it, you may not have gotten the new feed correctly and will need to resubscribe. When this change happens, I intend to put a final episode only in the current podbean feed to let you know that the feed is no longer in use. If everything goes right, you will never see that episode. If you do, it means you need to resubscribe. Once the process has been started, I will let you know again.